Retail operations and, more specifically, food establishments such as cafeterias, convenience stores, and fast-food restaurants that sell food items, are known to furnish paper product with the food items being sold. This paper product, such as napkins or paper towels, is furnished so that the customers may be able to wipe their hands and faces during and/or after consumption of the food items being purchased by them.
Some food establishments make manual dispensers available in or around the point-of-sale and/or eating areas in which the food items are typically consumed. In operations of that type, the food establishment has no control over the number of paper product taken by each customer. This often results in customers taking more paper product than are necessary to wipe their hands and/or faces during or after consuming the food items that are purchased from the food establishment. Unused paper product are often found at tables or other areas of the establishment and discarded. Alternatively, customers may take extra paper product, either to carry on their persons or to take to their offices or automobiles, all of which adds to the operating costs of the establishment.
In an attempt to prevent the waste of paper product associated with manual dispensing, some food establishments have stopped providing manual, customer accessible dispensers, and instead now rely on their cashiers to dispense the paper product. Unfortunately, it is difficult for cashiers to accurately and quickly control the amount of paper product provided to customers, and also difficult to provide customers a quantity of paper product that is commensurate with the purchased food items. Manual dispensing of paper product in operations of this type is consequently ineffective, wasteful, and/or may lead to dissatisfaction on the part of customers. Additionally, manual dispensing of paper product by cashiers forces cashiers to consume time that would otherwise be spent taking orders. This results in a less-than-ideal speed of service, which may also lead to customer dissatisfaction.
Systems have been proposed, in which a direct connection is established between a cash register and a paper roll dispenser, so that the dispenser dispenses a predetermined number of paper sheets automatically, based on a command received directly from the cash register. A problem observed with those systems, however, is that the task of collecting the paper sheets still falls on the cashier or other attendants at the food establishment. This consumes valuable time, which in turn slows down service.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide systems and methods for dispensing paper product that address these and other shortcoming associated with dispensing of paper product at food establishments.